Thursday

if you're not familiar with this american life, then...well...i just don't know...you should be! it's one of my favorite things and the best way to spend noon to one on a sunday afternoon. but even if you're not around a radio from noon to one on a sunday you can listen to it whenever because they are so gracious as to offer it for free by download on their website. unfortunately there's no such thing as a free lunch and someone's got to pony up for that extra bandwidth, so they are asking for donations from listeners. i've been a loyal listener and downloader for quite a while so in addition to donating, tomorrow i'll post a few of my absolute favorite episodes of this american life to share with you guys. read ira's message and click here to donate.

Hello, listeners.

It's been a year-and-a-half since we decided to offer our show as a free, weekly podcast, and that's been a crazy, whopping success. But because so many people—sometimes more than half a million—are downloading and streaming our show each week, the Internet bandwidth to distribute the program this way costs $152,000 per year. We want to keep offering This American Life for free. You want us to keep offering the show for free. Our home station, Chicago Public Radio, doesn't need to make money on our podcast, but they can't lose $152,000 a year on it, either....Our dream is that we'll get you and most of our Internet listeners to chip in at the $1 or $5 level, and that'll cover everything. We'd love to take care of this expense with a flood of little donations from the people who actually listen to our show this way. And of course, if you feel that getting an hour of our show every week is worth more to you than a dollar a year, we'd be grateful for anything else you'd care to contribute. We really want to keep the podcast free.